THE DISSOLUTION OF SMALL WORLDS by Kurt Fawver

This is not a review. One of the interesting things about Kurt Fawver work, as hightlighted in his sophomore collection, THE DISSOLUTION OF SMALL WORLDS (Lethe Press, 2018), is his fascination with the Veil—by which I mean that thin line that separates this world from those beyond. And when I use the word “line” I mean it quite literally, as the barrier between worlds often appears in his fiction as a thinly drawn line from behind which the other side reaches out. The presence of other worlds and their effect on this one is a topic that is close to my heart (I edited a book on the subject, after all) and is one that I’ve returned to multiple times in my own fiction, but where I imagine my stories take place twenty feet from that line, peering and squinting at it in an attempt to make sense of what can be seen through the murky fog, Fawver’s stories take place an arm’s length away, where the other side is actively pushing through, grabbing at anything within reach to pull it back over. We see the other side’s effect in the marvellous “Special Collections” (not only a favourite of the book, but one of my favourite contemporary tales); and we feel the wonder of it in fluid structures of the brilliant “The Final Correspondence of Sabrina Locker”. Fawver also takes us beyond another Veil into the darkness within us with the study of the lingering affects of a lost Midian in “Marrowvale”; with the bizarre play, “The Gods in Their Seats, Unblinking”; and in the strange interview within the aptly named “An Interview with Samuel X. Slayden” (a sort-of spiritual successor to Clive Barker’s “Dread”). THE DISSOULTION OF SMALL WORLDS is a volume that finds the middleground between the strange, the weird, and the philosophically perverse, and peels back those layers to examine what beats at its centre. In this era where the world grows more fascinated daily by all nature of horrors, Fawver’s book acts as a flagpole, signalling his intent to plunge forward into that breach and take us all with him.